Analysis of software systems with respect to security and performance has proven to be extremely useful to development requirements and to the design of systems. As such, it can be particularly advantageous to incorporate security engineering and analysis into the software development life cycle from the beginning stages of design. Conventionally, the application life cycle lacks security engineering and analysis thereby prompting retroactive measures to address identified security attacks and issues.
Today, when developing an application, it is oftentimes difficult to predict how the application will react under real-world conditions. In other words, it is difficult to predict security vulnerabilities of an application prior to and during development and/or before completion. Frequently, upon completion, a developer will have to modify the application in order to adhere to real-world conditions and threats of attacks. This modification can consume many hours of programming time and delay application deployment—each of which is very expensive.
Traditionally, designing for application security is oftentimes random and does not produce effective results. As a result, applications and data associated therewith are left vulnerable to threats and uninvited attacks. In most cases, the typical software practitioner lacks the expertise to effectively predict vulnerabilities and associated attacks.
While many threats and attacks can be estimated with some crude level of certainty, others cannot. For those security criterions that can be estimated prior to development, this estimate most often requires a great amount of research and guesswork in order to most accurately determine the criterion. The conventional guesswork approach of security analysis is not based upon any founded benchmark. As well, these conventional approaches are not effective or systematic in any way.
Rather, conventional security approaches are base upon a trial-and-error mechanism. In other words, traditional systems tend to be reactive as users lack the expertise necessary to formulate a proactive security mechanism. As such, these traditional trial-and-error approaches lead to costly interruptions and expensive programming time in order to rectify issues as they arise.
In summary, traditional application life cycle development approaches do not proactively (and accurately) address security issues from the beginning to the end of the life cycle. To the contrary, developers often find themselves addressing security and performance issues after the fact—after development is complete. This retroactive modeling approach is extremely costly and time consuming to the application life cycle.